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Monday, 18 August 2014

Southend Raspberry Jam August 2014

Now I keep hearing lots about this particular event and I live well over a hundred miles from it (as the crow flies). So today I was up extra early and with a full tank of petrol set off on a two and a half hour trip to Southend.

I was greeted by Derek and his crew and given a table to set up on. I was here to promote my MyPiFi LED Board that had recently been on kickstarter and now has had a makeover.

With lots to sell (sold 20) I was there promoting the aspects of soldering and programming them.

Later on a young lad cane up to me to ask for the PIN numbers of the LEDs, he had only gone and soldered his kit whilst there and was then programming it on one of the spare computers, well done.

A few more people had a go at soldering their kits which worked but got me thinking, should I have just sold the kits with normal headers to make soldering easier or keep the extended headers as they can use them for adding more to the project? I decided to keep the extended headers as no doubt while it's harder to solder a extended header the person doing this might get a better sense of achievement for doing so.

Jarle was there showing off various boards including one that suspiciously looked like a reviewers board of the mypifi in purple.

Average man also had a great radio project plus his latest boards where we swapped our own boards with each other (old fashion bartering) and he showed me a game he had made with his mypifi board.

Michael Horne had his excellent startrek like box that had all these sensors on it with him along with some other boards including a pi piano invented and designed by Zachary that is soon to be on kickstarter.

There were also mind control with the pi, the infamous robot hand and whaleygeek with his new neopixel slider that looked and worked great.

Peter Onion who I haven't seen in a long time brought along four rgb led matrix boards bought from skpang and ran a game of life demo on it, already I was thinking how you could put this up on the wall for parties or entertaining as it would be a great conversation starter.

All through I couldn't get away to see the talks I was told they were great including a minecraft talk, mind control and quad copters.

Carrie-ann philben popped in and dropped some books off for the raffle (signed) and modmypi offered a great first prize but the best prizes were the 4th and 5th prizes the MyPiFi LED Boards (also available on eBay and good pi stockists).

Shame to say in going to have to go to another Southend jam soon even if it means another 5 hour round trip.